


frisk's guide on how to kill your own ego (and yourself while you're at it)

by whittler_of_words



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, References to Undertale Genocide Route, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, strong themes of suicidal ideation and self harm throughout
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 12:13:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20435831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whittler_of_words/pseuds/whittler_of_words
Summary: It’s crossing the street without looking both ways. It’s not wearing a helmet, and taking long walks late at night. It’s climbing back up the mountain every once in a while and wondering just how many sinkholes are left for someone to stumble over.It’s the sort of line that’s impossible to see until it’s already been crossed.





	frisk's guide on how to kill your own ego (and yourself while you're at it)

Chara catches on half-way through, when a shard of magic bullshit phases through your sweater and your skin and chips off another part of you that you can barely afford.

You don’t know if you expect them to say something. They don’t. You don’t have much time to focus on it -- the impact of Chilldrake’s ice feels like hitting your funnybone except throughout your entire body, and while not exactly painful, it’s not the most pleasant thing you’ve ever experienced, either. 

You’ve endured worse.

You come back into yourself three hours in the past. The save point is a false yellow over the snow, the same shade that flashes behind your eyes every time your HP dips. When it reaches zero. The same feeling that wraps you up from inside when your feet are too heavy to move, and you just - can’t. Because you aren’t. Not anymore.

The memory of nonexistence burns even colder than the snow, and you let yourself breathe.

_Feel better now?_ Chara asks. The sarcasm dripping from their voice is so much that you almost expect it to leak out your ears.

_No,_ you answer, shortly. You have ground to cover. Three hours of ground, to be exact. 

_I think you’re the most fucked up person I’ve ever met,_ Chara continues, heedless of the fact that you’re studiously ignoring them, _and considering that I’m counting myself, that’s saying a lot._

+

Empathy, you find, is a lot harder to learn than it is to forget.

Shyren’s song is the same as it was the first time, and the last. The only difference is that you don’t interrupt her with a kick to the face, and seeing her now, her voice growing louder and bright and beautiful in the echoing caverns of Waterfall, you think of the Shyren you’d killed before, and how she could’ve been like this.

Right?

The thought leaves a stinging feeling in your throat. You wish you could make it stop. Could dig deep enough to pull the _caring_ out of you with your fingernails, and leave it under some bench somewhere. Things were easier when you weren’t full of so much guilt.

Empathy and guilt go hand in hand, you guess.

There are monsters starting to gather before the performance, but you’re not thinking about them when you don’t step out of the way of Shyren’s next song fast enough.

The only person you’re thinking about is yourself, and then you don’t think anything at all.

+

You’re not so disillusioned that you believe letting yourself die actually makes up for anything. Maybe you would have thought that once, or did, but you know now that it’s really hard to make up for something that never happened.

You hate yourself for feeling anything at all for the people who hurt you, but you hate yourself even more for the fact that it’s not dying that hurts the most.

It’s losing the time that’s frustrating. The minutes -- hours -- not days, but it’d probably add up to something like weeks if you put it all together. They say it’s the journey that matters, not the destination, but whoever says that obviously hasn’t lived the same journey over and over again. 

And, well. It’s the very least you deserve.

+

It’s the fourth time you get to the surface that you finally let it all stick, because you’ve always thought that third time’s the charm was kind of dumb, and you’d take any excuse to postpone admitting that you’re incapable of getting the perfect ending.

Not that you were ever a perfectionist. You’re more than proof enough of that.

(The fourth time is the one where you finally accept that just because you didn’t kill anyone doesn’t mean that everyone survives. Maybe it’s unfair to Asriel to think of him as dead when he’s technically still around, but you know what it’s like to exist without a soul -- know what it’s like to have a soul with the memory of existing without one -- and it’s something you wish you could have saved him from. Would, still, if he’d let you. Chara is the same roiling mass of anger in your chest they were the first time you left Asriel in the Ruins, and the second. You more than know what it’s like to blame yourself.

And even then, where does the tragedy stop? At whatever the hell is going on in the skeletons’ basement? At the other dumb dead kids who might have even gone down the same paths you have? At the Barrier’s creation itself? At the War? It’s not that trying to fix a checklist of mistakes from the past wouldn’t end well; it’s that it wouldn’t _end,_ no matter how desperately you’d want to make things perfect. )

As it turns out, “letting it stick” is harder than you expected, for entirely wrong reasons.

+

_Well, this is new,_ Chara says, because they can’t stop talking in uncomfortable situations in the same way that you just can’t at all.

Though you know they don’t really mean it. The marks on your arm may be fresh, but it’d be impossible to miss the scars layered underneath them.

_You gonna tell me I shouldn’t?_ you ask, even if you’re already sure of the answer.

_I would if I thought you’d listen,_ they say, surprising you. _Dad was actually trying to help me with the whole recovery thing before I kicked it. _They stop talking, simply observing as you reach for the gauze and tape stashed under the sink. _Though I guess this is still a step up from before._

_I don’t know what you’re talking about,_ you lie. The peroxide stings. It’s fine. Now that your head is clear, you can wrap this up and no one will know and you can go back to thinking about humans, and re-integration, and putting on a pleasant expression for the newspapers and magazines so that people will maybe stop freaking out so much. You hate cameras. The lights are always so hot. It’s fine. Toriel’s been trying to keep it from you, but some talk shows have been wanting to get you in their live studio things. It’s fine.

This will have to be enough.

+

Half of the time, death is an accident.

It was an accident, the first time you killed a monster. And then you’d been so upset at the mistake that you hadn’t been able to dodge the attacks of the Froggit that came along shortly after, and your death then had been an accident, too. 

But one thing had led to another, and. Well...

After that, the dust on your hands had been a different sort of mistake.

+

Maybe it’s Karma, but it’s almost funny that now that you want to get through this for real, the thought of having to start over if you mess up is more gut-wrenching than cathartic. Towards the end, the Underground had almost felt like the worst kind of multiple choice test, where the first three options were nearly indistinguishable from each other and the fourth was fill-in-the-blank. It’s easy enough to memorize all the right answers after getting them wrong enough times, of course; but then, what’s the fun of just going through the motions? When does it stop being your life and everyone else’s life and something important and start being...boring?

It’s crossing the street without looking both ways. It’s not wearing a helmet, and taking long walks late at night. It’s climbing back up the mountain every once in a while and wondering just how many sinkholes are left for someone to stumble over. 

It’s the sort of line that’s impossible to see until it’s already been crossed. 

You really thought that, after the first time you climbed the mountain, everything would be over. It’s why you took your plan’s failure as a sign that things just weren’t meant to work out that way, and you guess that, in the end, it all turned out for the best. What does it say about you, then, that even after everything -- all the friends you’ve made, the home you’ve been given, the life you’ve always dreamed of -- you’re still not satisfied enough to just be happy?

Sunlight and dust staining the backs of your eyes, you wonder if you ever will be.

+

_So,_ Chara says. _What are you going to do?_

_About what?_

_Don’t play coy with me._ Back when this all started, before you could read the future like a book, you would pretend Chara’s voice was coming from somewhere just behind you, trailing after you like a friend with a pace slightly slower than yours. They don’t exist anywhere except inside you now, of course. The illusion still hits you sometimes, though, especially when you least expect it, and their voice carries itself through the open window of your room. _Do you want to die or not?_

_Dunno._ You close the book sitting before you on the bed. _Would you try to stop me?_

_I know better than anyone that trying to stop you from doing anything is just short of futile._ _And I know better than most that this is typically the sort of thing one can’t be dissuaded from in the first place._

The urge to scoff comes to you by reflex, so there’s little to stop you from doing so. _Then why ask?_

_Because I still care, like it or not. And as determined as you are to believe that you’re alone, I feel like it’s my duty to remind you that you are not._

Oh.

You sit up. Frown at the window. _It’s not like I’d be taking you with me. I’m sure there’s ways I could do it where you could still--_

“Do not even dare,” they say, the surprise of them ganking on your vocal chords mostly startling because you’d been trying to inhale while they said it, and you’re left coughing for a good second as a result. You’re not given much of a reprieve, though, and you try not to feel too bitter about that. Fail, mostly. “You seriously think I’d want to be left here? By myself? There’s no way I could tell anyone else where I came from and how I got here, and I will _not_ pretend to be you just to avoid that conversation. Fuck you.”

Angry now and not wanting to show it, you get up and head out to the bathroom, turning on the sink to splash water in your face. You drink some from the faucet too, throat dry. _What do you want from me, then? An apology?_

“No.” They don’t stop at using your voice, lifting your head to scowl into the mirror, and then your hands, pointing one at your reflection. “I want to know what the fuck is wrong with you.”

_Do you want a list?_ you snap. _A Ted Talk? Give me a second, I’ll bust out an interpretive dance--_

They interrupt you, again. Make a strangled sounding shriek-growl-noise they quickly bite down on while fisting your hands in your hair. “I want you to be _honest_ for once in your miserable life,” they whisper, maybe trying not to be heard. Maybe trying to be dramatic. Coin toss. 

_Why? You were there, you’ve *seen* everything. _Chara has an iron grip on most of your limbs, but the huff of air from your nose is all you; a small relief. _There’s nothing for me to say that you don’t already know._

“Cool cool cool,” they say, “so you’re, what, strung up with guilt over mistakes past? Fucked up over killing everyone you know and love? About being killed, mayhaps? Is that it?”

_I’m **tired.**_

They don’t say anything to that. Looking in the mirror now, you’re reminded of other runs; other mirrors; simple moments in time strung up completely amidst the wreckage of other, more important decisions. It’s me. It’s you.

Looking in the mirror now, you feel like you can really see them in your eyes.

_I don’t know if I’m a good or bad person anymore,_ you say. _I don’t know if good or bad people even exist, and I don’t care. It doesn’t matter._ Your hands clench against the cool ceramic of the sink. _I’ve run through everything so many times. I think I lost count. How--_

“Four good ones,” Chara says. “Two bad ones. Thirty-seven of mixed completion, and over three-hundred deaths.”

The numbers sink into your bones like concrete. You stew in them for a moment until you remember you had a point you were trying to make. _All those resets and loads, trying to find better ways._ Better ways to save, or better ways to kill; you’d dabbled in both. _I thought that once I stopped, it’d at least feel like I was starting to move forward. Away._ _But the more days that go by without a reset, the more I feel like I’ve done this all before._

Chara thinks about this for a moment. “That’s stupid.”

_Your face is stupid._

“My face is your face.”

_Exactly,_ you retort. 

“Alright, I can respect that,” they say. “But it’s still stupid. These past couple months have been way different from how things were.”

_But I’m not._

You’d been slow to realize it, at first. Realizing you have the ability to turn back time tends to give certain questions more importance than others, and the sort of self realization that came with dying over and over and over again was slow to coagulate. Eventually, dying had become less of a way of running away from your mistakes, and more a way of running from yourself. Eventually, you’d stopped seeing much of a difference between the two.

Despite how much you might wish otherwise, you will continue to be no one but yourself.

There’s a niggling fear in the back of your mind that’s not so much _just shy _of certainty, as it is... there. The idea that you know how this all will end. People might change, but you’ve seen people change for the best and the absolute worst, and in the end, people don’t change all that much. So, you will mess up again. You’ll make another mistake. Hurt someone else like you’ve done so many times before. Maybe, next time, it won’t even be yourself.

So if you’re just going to end up right back where you started, what’s the point?

“You’re catastrophizing,” Chara says. “Or however the hell that’s pronounced. You’re also having a panic attack.”

_I’m not,_ you shoot back.

“Okay.” They splash more water on your face. “So, you’re chock full of trauma and also want to off yourself. Can’t say I’ve never been there. Don’t think there’s anything I can say that you couldn’t figure out for yourself.”

_That people love me and will miss be and blah blah blah?_

“Sure. Will you get mad if I try to say something anyway?”

_Probably._

“Good. You’ve got blinders on,” they tell you, “and I’m allowed to say that because I have them too. I know there’s moments you’re glad to still be alive. You wouldn’t be this fucked up over whether or not to pull the trigger if there weren’t.” Shutting off the faucet, Chara shakes droplets off their hands, getting water all over the counter. 

_...Maybe._

“I’m glad you agree, but also, shut up. I’m not done. You’ve proven me wrong about myself before,” they say. “and more than once. I don’t know why you think I wouldn’t want to try returning the favor.”

You glower at your shared reflection. _I hate you._

They snort. “Go ahead. Hating me is better than you hating yourself.”

Somehow, that hits a nerve you didn’t even know existed. You duck your head, hand clinging to each other behind your neck. _That’s not better at all._

“Come on, I’ll start,” they say. “_Why don’t you just leave me alone, Chara? Why don’t you mind your own business? This whole pep talk is rich coming from the kid who can’t seem to stop killing themself either, huh, I guess it takes one fuckup to recognize a--”_

_That’s--_

“_If you really cared, why didn’t you say something sooner? You only want to have these conversations when it’s easiest for you, but the second things get too real for you you just--”_

_Stop!_

“No.” Chara doesn’t look in the mirror, but they lift your head enough to rest your forehead against the glass. “Not until you realize how much it sucks to know someone you care about believes stuff like that.”

There’s not much you can say to defend yourself there.

“We both know I’m not sunshine and fucking rainbows all the time,” they start. “And I don’t even believe what I’m about to say all the time either, but giving up on yourself never helps. Even if you can’t believe that, can you at least believe it’s worth a shot?”

Can you?

_I don’t know._ You wish, suddenly, there was something in here you could break. _I don’t know if I want to._

“That’s fine.” They nod out to the empty air. “As long as the answer isn’t _no,_ it means you still have hope.”

+

By the time you figure out what they’ve done, your perspective on it all has changed enough that you can’t even find it in yourself to be angry. Old habits die hard, but you’ve died more than enough yourself to know that even the most stubborn of things can be worn down after enough time. 

You’re a perfect example of that, actually.

Maybe you really won’t ever be satisfied. Maybe you actually did die that day on the mountain, and everything afterwards has just been some storybook rendition of your own personal hell, or whatever. Maybe the only thing standing between you and happiness is the idea that you don’t deserve it.

Guess you’ll find out eventually.


End file.
